“Curiously enough, Mrs. Weatherley is displeased with me.  I should have thought it entirely through her influence and suggestions that Mr. Weatherley had been so kind to me, but to-day I asked her some questions which I felt that I had a right to ask, and have been told to mind my own business.  She left me at the office without even saying ‘Good afternoon.’”

“What sort of questions?”

“I don’t know that I can tell you exactly what the questions were,” Arnold continued, “because they concerned some matters in which Mrs. Weatherley and her brother were chiefly concerned.  To tell you the truth, ever since that night when I went to Hampstead to dine, the oddest things seem to have happened to me.  I have to pinch myself sometimes to realize that this is London and that I am a clerk in the office of a wholesale provision merchant.  When I let myself go, I seem to have been living in an unreal world, full of strange excitements—­a veritable Arabian Nights.”

“There was that terrible murder,” she murmured.  “You saw that, didn’t you?”

He nodded.

“Not only saw it,” he agreed, “but I seem, somehow, to have been mixed up with people who know a great deal about it.  However, I have been told to mind my own business and I am going to.  I have plenty to occupy my thoughts in Tooley Street.  I am going to close in my little world and live there.  The rest I am going to forget.”

“You are coming back!” she whispered, with a joy in her tone which amazed him.

“I suppose I am,” he admitted.  “I like and admire Mrs. Weatherley’s brother, Count Sabatini, and I have a genuine affection for Mrs. Weatherley, but I don’t understand them.  I don’t understand these mysterious matters in which they seem mixed up.”

“I do not believe,” she declared, “that Count Sabatini would be mixed up in anything dishonorable.  Women so seldom make a mistake, you know,” she continued, “and I never met any one in my life who seemed so kind and gentle.”

Arnold sighed.

“I wish I could tell you everything,” he said, “then I think you would really be as bewildered as I am.  Mr. Weatherley’s disappearance coming on the top of it all simply makes my brain reel.  I can’t do anything to help straighten things out.  Therefore, I am going to do what I am told—­I am going to mind my own business.”

“To think only of Tooley Street,” she murmured.

“I shall find it quite enough,” he answered.  “I want to understand all the details of the business, and it isn’t easy at first.  Mr. Jarvis is very sound and good, but he’s a very small man moving in a very small way.  Even Mr. Weatherley used to laugh at his methods.”

She was silent for several moments.  He studied her expression curiously.

“You don’t believe that I shall be able to immerse myself in business?” he asked.

“It isn’t exactly that,” she replied.  “I believe that you mean to try, and I believe that to some extent you will succeed, but I think, Arnold, that before very long you will hear the voices calling again from the world where these strange things happened.  You are not made of the clay, dear, which resists for ever.”