Arnold struck the table on the edge of which he was sitting with the palm of his hand.

“Look here,” he asked hoarsely, “if you knew all these things, if you knew that Isaac Lalonde had committed this murder, why do you go about with your lips closed?  Why haven’t you told the truth?  An innocent man might be arrested at any time.”

Sabatini smiled tolerantly.

“My dear fellow,” he said, “why should I?  Be reasonable!  When you reach my age you will find that silence is often best.  As a matter of fact, in this ease my sympathies are very much involved.  It is in the mind of many of those who hold the strings that when that revolution does take place it will be I who shall lead it.”

Arnold was again bewildered.

“But you,” he protested, “are of the ancient nobility of Europe.  What place have you among a crowd of anarchists and revolutionaries?”

“You jump at conclusions, my young friend,” remarked Sabatini.  “The country of which we have spoken is my country, the country from which, by an unjust decree I am exiled.  There are among those who desire a change of government, many aristocrats.  It is not only the democracy whose hatred has been aroused by the selfish and brutal methods of the reigning house.”

Arnold got down from his table and walked to the window.  The telephone rang with some insignificant inquiry from a customer.  The incident somehow relieved him.  It brought him back to the world of every-day events.  The reality of life once more obtruded itself upon his conscience.  All the time Sabatini lounged at his ease and watched him, always with the faint beginning of a smile upon his lips.

“What I have told you,” the latter continued, after a few moments’ pause, “must not, during these days, pass beyond the four walls of this singularly uninviting-looking apartment.  I have nothing to add or to take from what I have said.  The subject is closed.  If you have more questions on any other subject, I have still a few minutes.”

“Very well, then,” Arnold said, coming back to his place, “let us consider the Rosario matter disposed of.  Let us go back for a moment to Starling.  Tell me why you and your sister saw danger to yourselves in Starling’s nervous breakdown?  Tell me why, when I returned to Pelham Lodge with her that night, she found a dead man in her room, a man whose body was afterwards mysteriously removed?”

“Quite a spirited number of questions,” Sabatini remarked.  “Well, to begin with, then, Rosario signed his death-warrant the moment he wrote his name across the parchment which guaranteed the loan.  On the night when you first visited Pelham Lodge we heard the news.  I believe that Lalonde and his friends would have killed him that night if they could have got at him.  Lalonde, however, was a person of strange and inaccessible habits.  He hated all aristocrats, and he refused even to communicate with me.  Speaking for myself,